WorldAPIs: The World Is Worth How Many APIs? A Thought Experiment

AI systems make decisions in physical environments through primitive actions or affordances that are accessed via API calls. While deploying AI agents in the real world involves numerous high-level actions, existing embodied simulators offer a limited set of domain-salient APIs. This naturally brings up the questions: how many primitive actions (APIs) are needed for a versatile embodied agent, and what should they look like? We explore this via a thought experiment: assuming that wikiHow tutorials cover a wide variety of human-written tasks, what is the space of APIs needed to cover these instructions? We propose a framework to iteratively induce new APIs by grounding wikiHow instruction to situated agent policies. Inspired by recent successes in large language models (LLMs) for embodied planning, we propose a few-shot prompting to steer GPT-4 to generate Pythonic programs as agent policies and bootstrap a universe of APIs by 1) reusing a seed set of APIs; and then 2) fabricate new API calls when necessary. The focus of this thought experiment is on defining these APIs rather than their executability. We apply the proposed pipeline on instructions from wikiHow tutorials. On a small fraction (0.5%) of tutorials, we induce an action space of 300+ APIs necessary for capturing the rich variety of tasks in the physical world. A detailed automatic and human analysis of the induction output reveals that the proposed pipeline enables effective reuse and creation of APIs. Moreover, a manual review revealed that existing simulators support only a small subset of the induced APIs (9 of the top 50 frequent APIs), motivating the development of action-rich embodied environments.

PARADISE: Evaluating Implicit Planning Skills of Language Models with Procedural Warnings and Tips Dataset

Recently, there has been growing interest within the community regarding whether large language models are capable of planning or executing plans. However, most prior studies use LLMs to generate high-level plans for simplified scenarios lacking linguistic complexity and domain diversity, limiting analysis of their planning abilities. These setups constrain evaluation methods (e.g., predefined action space), architectural choices (e.g., only generative models), and overlook the linguistic nuances essential for realistic analysis. To tackle this, we present PARADISE, an abductive reasoning task using Q\&A format on practical procedural text sourced from wikiHow. It involves warning and tip inference tasks directly associated with goals, excluding intermediary steps, with the aim of testing the ability of the models to infer implicit knowledge of the plan solely from the given goal. Our experiments, utilizing fine-tuned language models and zero-shot prompting, reveal the effectiveness of task-specific small models over large language models in most scenarios. Despite advancements, all models fall short of human performance. Notably, our analysis uncovers intriguing insights, such as variations in model behavior with dropped keywords, struggles of BERT-family and GPT-4 with physical and abstract goals, and the proposed tasks offering valuable prior knowledge for other unseen procedural tasks. The PARADISE dataset and associated resources are publicly available for further research exploration with https://github.com/GGLAB-KU/paradise.